Environmental protection is not about preserving water quality or endangered species or clean air. It is about preserving man.
That was the message of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a renown environmental lawyer and son of slain Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. He called on Utahns to join the environmental battle to save the planet from the destruction of polluters and subsidized corporations who would sacrifice limited natural resources for a quick profit.
"It's not for the sake of fishes and birds and animals, but because it enriches us," Kennedy told several hundred people who attended the Weldon J. Taylor Lecture Series at Westminster College. "When we destroy nature, we impoverish ourselves."
Kennedy, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, used his speech to call for tougher enforcement of existing environmental laws and to criticize Congress for attempting to weaken those laws. In fact, if laws passed by the Republican-controlled Congress had been signed into law, there would not be any significant environmental protection remaining, he said.
"That is not an exaggeration. It is not hyperbole," he said.
Kennedy has earned a reputation across the country for his highly successful legal attacks on corporate polluters, particularly along the Hudson River in New York. He has since expanded his attention to environmental problems in other countries.
Recently, the Bahamas governing party warned Kennedy to stay out of a local dispute over a $400 million luxury housing development. Kennedy said the development would destroy historic sites, harm coral reefs and erode beaches, prompting government officials to warn they would bar him for working illegally in the Bahamas.
Most of his attention has been focused on forcing corporations and governments to comply with existing laws. Kennedy said those who seek to undermine the nation's environmental laws use a false argument, that somehow citizens have to choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection.
Yet wise stewardship of natural resources makes good economic sense and preserves resources for future generations. But corporations are bent on extracting as much wealth as they can with no regard to the future, much as if someone were to drain a pond to get all the fish rather than fishing for just what they need, Kennedy said.
"Our children are going to pay for our joy ride," he said. "Environmental injury is deficit spending."
If the public doubts the foresight behind current federal environmental laws, passed by both Republicans and Democrats in the 1970s, then they need look only as far as those nations that had no environmental protection. In China, tens of thousands of people die every year from smog inversions. In Bangkok, people wear gas masks. Entire areas of the former Soviet Union are wastelands.
In effect, the legacy of the industrial revolution in those countries "matured into an economic catastrophe," he said. And the same thing will happen here if Congress dismantles federal environmental protections, he added, calling the laws an investment in the economic infrastructure for future generations.
Kennedy also discounted attempts to return environmental regulation to the states under the guise of community control. The real outcome, he said, will be corporate control as states and cities are seduced by "the promise of a few years of pollution-based prosperity."
Kennedy also called for an end to government subsidies for companies that extract natural resources. He singled out the mining, timber and livestock industry as examples of a "system of socialism for the rich."
And because these companies get the resources free or almost free, they waste them, he said. He advocated a true free market system in which environmental costs are properly reflected in the cost of doing business.
"Show me pollution and I will show you a subsidy," he said. "They are crybabies. You can hear them when you pull the federal nipple out of their mouths."